Poisoning Topology View in Software-Defined Vehicular Network: An Empirical Study

The development of the vehicular ad-hoc network (VANET) provides a promising solution to promoting road safety and driving experiences, but it also generates massive data, leading to network configuration and management issues. Fortunately, by integrating software-defined network (SDN) and VANET, a new network paradigm called software-defined vehicular network (SDVN) is proposed to tackle these problems via furnishing centralized control and programmability. With the help of SDN, the centralized controller provides global visibility about network devices and improves the efficiency of various applications. However, the building procedure of global topology also brings new security concerns to the SDVN. In this paper, we comprehensively investigate the security of topology management under a standard SDVN scenario. By exploiting the high mobility of VANET and vulnerabilities in topology management inherited from SDN, we unveil five threats of topology poison in SDVN with lower attack bars. Based on such threats, we propose several attacks to poison the global topology of four mainstream controllers in emulated and real-world environments. Additionally, we present empirical studies to illustrate the impact of these attacks on network communication and topology-based applications. Finally, we discuss the feasibility of these attacks under existing state-of-the-art defense systems.